Description
A playthrough of Taito's 1990 action-platformer for the NES, Demon Sword.
"Welcome to an epic saga of Good versus Evil, where a Dark Fiend rules an ancient world with cruel, terrifying magic. The land cries for a champion to end the eternal tyranny. From small farming village in the High Hills comes a noble fighter called Victar. He carries the battered and rusted hilt of an old sword, The fables tell of how this sword once defeated the Dark Fiend. Victar must find the missing blades and overcome the Fiend’s demon horde."
Thus begins Victar's quest to reassemble the ancient "seven-branched sword," the Shichishitou, before plumbing the depths of Hell to fight the warrior king who sits upon a skeletal throne.
Demon Sword is a Tose-developed, NES-exclusive platformer that, by all appearances, seems to be a spiritual successor to Taito's The Legend of Kage, a 1985 Taito arcade hit that was later brought to the NES. It retains much of the same feel while expanding on its scope and gameplay mechanics.
Victar charges through seven levels, leaping incredible distances as he fends off waves of ninja with his sword and shuriken. He can collect magic that does things like summon lightning strikes, shoot beams, and conjure temporary clones of himself, and if he has any keys handy, he can open "mystic gates" that lead to either a room with power-ups or a mini-boss fight.
The levels provide plenty of opportunities for exploration, and though controls take some getting used to, before long, you'll find yourself effortlessly soaring between tree tops, scaling mountain faces, and violently stabbing anything that dares look in your general direction. The challenge is dialed in just right, and it kept me coming back for quite a while before I'd finally had my fill.
And the stages look pretty nice in that faintly crude yet atmospheric way that exemplified Tose's higher-end NES games. The evocative backdrops are clear, bright, and loaded with cool little details, Victar's animation is smooth, and the cutscenes are satisfyingly moody.
It's a lot of fun. I might even go so far as to call it underrated, given how low it flies under the radar despite its overall quality.
The only real gripe I have with it (and this is something that I should frame as an anachronistic insight - something I would've never known if not for the internet coming along years later) is that it was hacked to pieces for its US release. The Famicom game, 不動明王伝 (Fudou Myouou Den), was about twice the length of the NES game. It had several more stages, bosses, and special powers, along with an intro and a longer ending cutscene. The Famicom game was 384K (3 megabits), while the NES version was only 256K (2 megabits), so it's probably safe to assume that Taito took up the chainsaw in pursuit of a larger profit margin. Taken on its own, the NES game doesn't feel incomplete, but it's a shame that so much content was removed during the localization process.
Either way, Demon Sword is a solid B-tier action game with enough moxie to make it stand out, and the creepy old-school Japan vibes are the perfect cherry on top.
(And here's a fun bit of trivia: the shrine maiden you save at the end is Sayo from Kiki Kaikai, better known to the English-speaking world as Pocky from Pocky & Rocky.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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